While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around you is engaged in the same, you’re not. While everybody around you is trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to “get there,” trying to be worthy, you’re not. While everyone thinks that awakening is a grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it’s not. While everybody is running from this life right now, in this moment, to try to get there, you’re not. Where everybody has an argument with somebody else, mostly everybody else, starting with themselves, you don’t. Where everybody is so sure that happiness will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won’t. When everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state and hold on to it, you’re not.

When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and beliefs about a whole variety of things, you don’t. Everyone on the path is getting there; you haven’t gotten anywhere. Everyone is climbing the mountain; you’re selling hiking boots and picks at the foot in the hope that if they climb it and come back down, they may be too exhausted to do it again. When everybody else is looking to the next book, to the next teacher, to the next guru to be told what’s real, to be given the secret key to an awakened life, you’re not. You don’t have a key because there’s not a lock to put it in.

When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, being simply what you’ve always been, you’re actually very simple. You basically sit around wondering what all the fuss is about.

When everyone is sitting around saying, “I hope that happens to me,” you remember when you did that. You remember that you didn’t find a solution to that. You remember that the whole idea that there was a problem created all of that.

When you’re being what you are, when you’re living the awakened life, there’s nobody to forgive, because there’s no resentment held, no matter what.

The truth of your being doesn’t crave happiness; it could actually care less. It doesn’t crave love, not because you are so full of love, but because it just doesn’t crave love. It’s very simple. It doesn’t seek to be known, regarded highly, or understood. When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, there’s no ideal for you anymore. You’ve stepped off the entire cycle of suffering, of becoming; you’re not interested.

It’s a curious life you find yourself in. You find yourself… where you are. Not where I am, where you are. Where you really are. Where we really are. It’s a curious place to be (especially in the beginning) not to be driven by anything—pleasure or displeasure, helping or hurting, loving or hating. The only thing that will move you (and I don’t mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It’s simply because the breeze blows that way. So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and that’s the way you go. You don’t ask questions anymore. You don’t evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don’t know why. And you know you can’t know why. There’s never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment to moment to moment, simply because that’s the way life’s moving. And when you’re living in your awakened self you have no argument with the way it’s moving because it is the same as you are.

And you know that the breeze was always there, from the very beginning, and that it wasn’t reserved for special people. If you didn’t notice it at some point in your life, you know it was because you weren’t listening, or because you thought you had to figure something out before you could listen, or because you thought there had to be some conclusion before you could just listen so deeply, so without agenda, so without hope of a better future that you would feel the movement.

Many of you know what I’m speaking of.

Truth never explains why it’s moving that way at that moment. And if you ask, it won’t give any information. It would be like a leaf asking the wind, “Why are you moving that way right now?” The question doesn’t make any sense to the wind.

But your argument with the way the truth would move—whatever that way is—is no longer there for you. You’re no longer arguing with it. You’re no longer trying to figure it out. Mother Mary didn’t figure it out. Buddha didn’t figure it out. Ramana didn’t figure it out. None of them figured it out. They just became That. Simple. Ordinary—in the same way a leaf is ordinary.

When you’re living in your awakened being and living in an awakened way, power on any level is not an issue for you. It’s not interesting. The power to control another human being is not interesting. Intellectual power is not interesting. The power to control yourself is not interesting. The power that people want to give you is not interesting to you—not because it shouldn’t be; it’s just not. What would you want to do with it? You see that there’s nothing you want to do with it.

You realize, in the truth of your being, that you are the totality itself, but you have no interest whatsoever in doing anything with that knowledge, with using that knowledge.

Finally, you realize that you really don’t want to change anybody, not because you shouldn’t want to change them, because you just don’t. You might not want to be around everyone, but still you don’t want to change them.

None of this is an ideal—it’s the end of ideals. None of this is holiness; it’s the end of holiness. It’s the beginning of wholeness. None of this is something to achieve, because it’s not achievable. It’s simply what is in the truth of your being. It’s just what is. You can’t attain what’s naturally so. And nobody anywhere can ever tell you when or why, or to what degree you’ll let go of untruth; you will let go when you let go, usually when nothing else works.

When you’re living in the awakened way, in the awakened being that you are, you’re alone, and you’re finally comfortable with it. You’re alone, but you’re not lonely at all, because the only one who was ever supposed to meet you where you are—the only one who ever could meet you where you are one hundred percent—was you. Nobody else could ever fully meet you where you are—maybe ninety percent, maybe ninety-five. Nobody can meet you fully but you. When you finally do, then you don’t need anybody else to do it for you. Then you’re alone, more alone than you could ever imagine. And strangely—very strangely—you are more connected, more intimate, more at one with everything. More. And you would have never thought that those two could in any way be together: total aloneness and total oneness. You would have never guessed that that’s the way it would end up. But it does, and it always has.

And finally, when you’re just living in the awakened way that you really are, you’ll never form an image again of what it’s like. Even as it’s happening, you won’t form an image because you’ll know they’re all images, dust. The way it was yesterday won’t be the way it is today.

Thanks for the great post Kiki. I love Adyashanti's style and peace. I've been reading "Impact of Awakening" for about 3 months. Another great read for anyone interested. Just a few lines or a page each day to feel the Essence of Awareness he points to. So wonderfully alone, so clearly present.

Don't be to hard on gurus and teachers. We don't have to live their life, we only have to live our own. If Joseph Stalin himself said something that helped get me clear, I'd make whatever use I could of it and move on.

Anytime we look at teachers under the microscope, they are likely to come up short of the perfection our mind may require them to be. It doesn't discount a useful pointer if they should express one. You know that the only way to clarity is by your own direct experience. Finding flaws in gurus is just one more way the mind protects its turf.

Webwanderer wrote: If Joseph Stalin himself said something that helped get me clear, I'd make whatever use I could of it and move on.

So you're comparing Adyashanti to Joe Stalin?? Wow, and they said my review was tough!

Webwanderer wrote:You know that the only way to clarity is by your own direct experience.

Yes, Krishnamurti constantly repeats "The speaker has no authority!" to make this point. Regrettably, he says it with great authority, but I'm charmed by the guy anyway.

But, point is, you are right, and that is why it's healthy to puncture some of the authority worship that tends to infect spiritual boards.

There's always an example close at hand. Like this.

Webwanderer wrote: Finding flaws in gurus is just one more way the mind protects its turf.

Even a casual reading of Tolle, Krishnamurti, and Adawhatshisname shows they are all about finding flaws with the group consensus and proposing radical departures from the accepted paradigms.

And they do it in hundreds upon hundreds of pages of thoughts and analysis etc.

(Please, no paradox gymnastics. Words on a page are thoughts, whoever types them.)

Cool, this is what makes these teachers interesting and useful, they have something different to say. Our horizons are expanded.

Now, please observe.

Anytime any poster here does EXACTLY THE SAME THING by articulating a consensus challenge with words, thoughts and analysis, another poster will always rush up to declare it invalid "mind stuff" etc.

When the authority figure does it, it's amazing.

When somebody who isn't an authority does it, it's unconscious etc.

We could type hundreds of posts here everyday, and so long as we don't challenge the group think, no one will ever say it's the mind protecting it's turf etc. At the very moment we depart from the hymnal, it is declared the posters psychological problem.

The process of typing words and thoughts is valid and useful, or not. We can't have it both ways, and still be honest.

It's an obvious point, but authority worship warps it out of whack for some of us.

Phil, I'm getting you don't like the feeling of being wrong and it pisses you off. Yes?

Knocking every one off pedistals is not clarity. It's just a clever way of bringing everyone else down to a level and understandable playing field. Mediocrity and cynicism at its best.
The sound of Self-awareness to the unconscious can be enraging. Contrast. The clever mind exposed. Kill the offending sound, it's screwing with my life. Isn't that the way it goes?

The guru is a sunny day, a fart. Be Self-aware and you won't have to be so picky where the truth comes from. Until then be open to all of it and feel where it resonates. These attitudes are just windows. Ya can't even draw the blinds cause it just makes it even more obvious what lives inside.

Last edited by joel on Sun Feb 11, 2007 3:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

Phil, you make sharp assumptions about what clarity would look and sound like, from some perspective. I've talked that way and know it comes from a clever mind trying to make out the lay of the land. You sound like someone who is more interested is entelectualizing the ideas than seeing what the words point to. You say that doesn't apply to you, OK. I'm actually happy to be wrong here.

These are the very guys that I got the 'big message' from, so I have no doubt that I'm a little too sensitive around this kind of talk.

My experience of all these spiritual pointers has been that some of the stuff the established teachers, like Tolle, have written about has resonated within me. Some of it hasn't. And it's been the same with this forum. Some I have felt and understood, at a deeper level than mind, while some has been gobbledygook.

"A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without effort on your part."
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mike wrote:My experience of all these spiritual pointers has been that some of the stuff the established teachers, like Tolle, have written about has resonated within me. Some of it hasn't. And it's been the same with this forum. Some I have felt and understood, at a deeper level than mind, while some has been gobbledygook.

Hi Mike,

Can you share with us what was the good stuff and what was the gobbledygook.